Critique internationale - Content
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Hermann Schmitt, Jacques Thomassen (eds.), Political Representation and Legitimacy in the European Union, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, 306 pages.
Richard S. Katz, Bernhard Wessels (eds.), The European Parliament, the National Parliaments, and European Integration, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, 278 pages.
Warren E. Miller, Roy Pierce, et al., Policy Representation in Western Democracies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, 180 pages.
Diner (Dan), Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung, Francfort, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000, 383 pages.
Durandin (Catherine), Roumanie – Un piège ? Saint-Claude-de-Diray, Éd. Hesse, 2000, 168 pages.
Esposito (John), Tamimi (Azzam), eds., Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, Londres, Hurst, 2000, 214 pages.
Fargues(Philippe), Générations arabes, l’alchimie du nombre, Paris, Fayard, 2000, 346 pages.
[A new foundation for development aid in the 21st century]
Its quest for legitimacy that is now tainted by mediocre results, public development aid has been reoriented towards the struggle against poverty. This recasting is extremely reductive and can only lead to new disappointments. In reality, aid has always rested on three foundations: ethical, geo-strategic, and economic. These have evolved considerably with the fall of the Berlin wall, economic globalization, and the mobilization of public opinion. One way of emerging from the contradictions in which public aid is today enmeshed would be through application of the theory of global public goods. This theory offers an economic and non-moral basis for the entire array of objectives defined by development aid, which would allow for its reentry into the world agenda.
[Is the concept of globalisation good for anything ? An historian’s perspective]
The "isation". The "global" pulls attention away from the specific mechanisms by which long-distance connections are made and their limits. The "isation" implies that the moment of world-wide integration is now: this is to underestimate the importance of long-distance movements of capital, people, social movements, ideas, and culture over the past 400 years and to overestimate the decline of national institutions. The concept cannot be rescued by labelling earlier forms of extension — in trade, migration, empire-building, or political networks — as protoglobalisation. Like modernisation theory in the 1950s, globalisation talk is influential — and misleading — for assuming coherence and direction instead of probing causes and processes. More discerning ways of analysing processes that cross borders but are not universal, that constitute networks and social fields but not on a planetary scale, would be more useful.
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[The Northern League and the invention of "Padan"]
Having won its public by waging war against state bureaucratic waste, the parasitic South, and immigration (or immigrants), the Northern League had to then present a positive entity in the face of all these enemies — hence the invention of "Padany", or the territories of northern Italy. However, as an invention, the Padan nation has no roots in a historical, geographical or cultural reality. While certain party ideologues have a liberal conception of affiliation to Padany, which entails shared values such as work and liberty, they are a minority. Most seek to construct (often through a discourse of exclusion) a cultural community. But, facing weak results, a minority is tempted to put forth the idea of an "autochthonous" group, to which only descendants of the "original" inhabitants of the north, who were allegedly Celt, could aspire.
[The Vlaams Blok and the "natural" Flemish person]
In Belgium, the importance of a register of identity based on exclusive categories (one is either Flemish or Walloon) does not leave any space for mixed identities. If the Vlaams Blok managed to gain ground in Flanders and even in Brussels, this is largely due to this conception of exclusion, which is generally embraced even by its anti-racist adversaries. This conception requires, most notably, that one be conformist: belonging is an orthopraxy. What makes the Vlaams Blok political program so successful is its pronounced phobia with respect to Islam: since Islam is not one of the pillars of Belgian consociational society, Muslims are constructed as absolute strangers in Belgium.
[The "ungrateful guests" of Georgia]
The notion of an "autochthonous" community is a fundamental aspect of the very definition of political rights in Georgia. Besides Georgians, certain "national minorities" themselves are now trying to claim an anterior presence in this swath of land, which has led to much conflict. Others, to the contrary, play the role of the "grateful guest". If "autochthony" is a more universal register than often presumed, it is nonetheless founded upon striking specificities in the Caucasus. These include the significance of rites of hospitality in customs and literature; the concomitance between Georgian nationalism and the historical imagination; and Soviet theories of nationality and ethnogenesis, and their associated political programs. Globalisation and, consequently, the arrival of numerous foreign actors (investors, bilateral agencies, international organizations) will surely ensure the future of the question of autochthony in Georgia.
[Autochthony, democracy and citizenship in Africa]
The discourse on autochthonous communities has become a generalized phenomenon on the African continent, often giving rise to atrocities (expulsions, pogroms, genocide). Quite curiously, this development is linked to democratization as well as the return to authoritarianism, with autochthony becoming the high stakes of the political game (Who votes where? Who has the right to candidacy?). Autochthony is also characteristic of a particular economic moment, which can be abbreviated as globalisation and the economic crisis that has provoked intense competition between citizens for access to certain public goods (school, health). Despite its destructive effects, it is not impossible that, as in Athens, autochthony proves to be the seed of future forms of citizenship
